nealcassady

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899)

This book is wonderful. A history of gang activity in New York City from roughly the beginning of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, written by a newspaper reporter, and the source material for the Martin Scorsese film of the same name. For much of the period covered by the book, politicians and police forces were largely on the take (Tammany Hall) and willing to look the other way while gangs carried on their business. Gangs were also hired by politicians to intimidate and harass during elections. In some sections of the city of the time, people lived in horrible poverty and almost unimaginable conditions, and it was from these areas that the gangs first arose. Asbury loves the colour and panache of the gangsters, who bore names like Monk Eastman, Bum Mahoney, Little Augie and Kid Dropper; gang names included The Daybreak Boys, The Hookers, and The Little Dead Rabbits. The gangs of the period were eventually brought under control as political and police corruption was exposed and public sentiment favoured reform. Asbury knows they were punks: ’ ... the gangster was a stupid roughneck born in filth and squalor and reared amid vice and corruption. He fulfilled his natural destiny.’ His enthusiasm in telling their legendary exploits, though, is infectious.

Schama uses the novelist’s tools to tell two stories which demonstrate the difficulty of arriving at a definitive version of any historical event. The first is the death of General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and the subsequent mythology built up around him by, among others, Benjamin West, who painted the very famous The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and the American historian Francis Parkman, who wrote about Wolfe. Schama shows us many different versions of Wolfe: was he hero or invalid? Whose interpretation is correct? Schama includes imagined scenes in his story, which are based on his careful research.

The second story is of the murder in Boston of Francis Parkman’s brother George by a Harvard professor named John Webster. Again, the focus is on the many different versions of the murder itself presented at Webster’s murder trial and the variety of impressions of Webster and Parkman among the citizens of Boston.

Schama is a very good writer, and this is an interesting examination of the historical process, of the fictionalizing tendency in all story-telling, whether fact-based or not. Nevertheless, I’m not sure, after reading it, why he wrote it. Two interesting stories, connected by the Parkman family, but nothing terribly urgent or profound in the material communicated. Still, worth reading.